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Why A Kayaking Website?

I have created Yackman.com as a way to share my passion for sea kayaking and wilderness, and to tell you about some of the places I have visited. I came to sea kayaking fairly late in life, after early years as a power boater and twenty years as a Great Lakes sailor.

In 1994, my wife Lisa and I were looking for a different kind of vacation experience, when I stumbled on an advertisement for a three day, wilderness kayaking trip off the coast of Maine near Bar Harbor. Neither one of us had been in a kayak before but we gave it a try and loved it. We’ve been kayaking now for another twenty years. I don’t plan to stop until I’m no longer able to paddle!

Paddling in a New Location

Originally from the beautiful, but cold and snowy, upstate New York, we have relocated to the sunny Treasure Coast of Florida. If you are a Snowbird, look here for information on paddling in Florida as you prepare for your winter visit. “Homesteaders” - full time Florida Residents, may find useful information here as well. And everyone will find great adventure stories.

Sebastian River Launch

Other Reviews on this Site

No Easy Day: The Autobiography of a Navy SEAL

Book Title: No Easy Day: The Autobiography of a Navy SEAL
(The First Hand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden)

Authors: Mark Owen with Kevin Maurer

Publisher: Dutton/The Penguin Group, New York

Copyright: 2012

Type: Kindle eBook

ISBN: 978-0-525-95372-2 (hardcover)

eISBN: 978-1-101-61130-2 (eBook)

Yackman’s Rating: 6 points out of 10

Review: I just finished reading No Easy Day, the story of the
SEAL Team 6 raid that killed Osama bin Ladin. It was written by Mark Owen with the help of Kevin
Maurer. Mark Owen is a pen name
used to hide the identity of the real SEAL and team leader who participated in
the raid and delivered the coup de grace that killed bin Laden. Owen was a SEAL for more than ten years
and participated in many missions, including another high profile rescue, that
of Richard Phillips, the captain of the merchant ship Maersk Alabama, who was
being held by Somali pirates.

The book is no literary masterpiece. But it does provide a straight-forward
description of one SEAL’s motivations and the kind of personality that is driven
to this kind of work. It opens
with a brief synopsis of the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. It then flashes back to the years of
training and the experiences that led up to the author’s participation in the
raid. This flash back represents
about two-thirds of the book. It
provides an important glimpse into the life and mindset of a man who claims to
be a typical Navy SEAL.

The description of the raid on bin Laden’s compound is
riveting. SEAL’s like Owen train
day after day, simulating all the different scenarios they might encounter,
till the necessary survival behavior becomes second nature, like the muscle
memory of elite athletes that requires little conscious thought to
complete. Raids become missions,
men become targets, and killing becomes routine.

The bin Laden raid was planned down to the smallest detail
and many contingencies were planned for.
Learning from the disastrous attempt to free the Iranian hostages during
the Carter Administration, they provided for multiple back-up helicopters in
case one or more of the attack craft were damaged or destroyed. Yet there were things they could not
know. For instance, they did not
know what the interior layout of bin Laden’s house was like. Once inside, they would have to rely on
their training to find their target.

We all know that the mission was a success and that bin
Laden was killed, so I won’t go into any more detail about the raid. As a society, we need these warriors,
acting as our surrogates, to hunt down the bad guys. We select them, train them and pay them to do this
work. But the whole issue of
the existence of a highly trained killing force employed and trained by us to
do our bidding is disturbing on several levels.

For example, what kind of men devote their lives to becoming
highly trained, disciplined killers?
They appear unmoved by the lives they take. Summing up one raid as a, “Successful mission. Seventeen killed”. The dead are the bad guys, the
targets. The SEAL’s have noble
motives, yet in the end they give their lives to the art of war and
killing. How do they do this? What toll does it take on them? Can they ever successfully leave this
work and reenter the larger society?
And who are we that we require this kind of service from others? The answers are not in this book.

Yet there is nobility, even if the contrasts are
jarring. After bin Laden has been
mortally wounded and dispatched with several shots to his chest, the SEAL’s
herd his traumatized children and one wife to a balcony removed from the scene,
while another tends to the wound a second wife sustained during the
action. In another incident, a
courier is killed in his house in an exchange of gunfire and then his wife and
children are escorted to safety.

The book is truly a riveting bit of history. Osama bin Laden was a mass murderer who
needed to be brought to justice.
This was done. And while I
do not rejoice in anyone’s death, I am satisfied that in this case, his death
was the correct and just thing. I
am thankful for the skilled men who delivered this justice and the courageous
president who ordered the mission.
Still, in my heart I long for a world in which men like bin Laden cease
to hate and where men like Mark Owen do not have to defend us from them.